Secretary of Energy Dan Brouillette is scheduled for an official visit to South Carolina today, during which he and the state’s attorney general are expected to announce a major financial settlement in a $200-million lawsuit over weapon-usable plutonium stored at the Savannah River Site for about a decade.
Two people with knowledge of the secretary’s travel schedule said Brouillette was indeed headed to South Carolina for this purpose, though they had no knowledge of potential settlement terms. Media also reported that a settlement is the “major announcement” DOE teased in a Saturday press release, when the agency said Brouillette was scheduled to meet Monday with “South Carolina’s Attorney General Alan Wilson, and other officials at the South Carolina State House.”
Wilson plans to livestream the meeting on Facebook.
The Energy Department has some 34 metric tons of plutonium to get rid of, about 10 metric tons of which the agency stores at the Savannah River Site today.
The federal and state governments have been fighting in court since 2016 about when and how DOE is going to remove that plutonium from the Savannah River Site. The parties have been in settlement talks this summer.
The Energy Department announced Brouillette’s high-profile visit to Columbia a day after the agency formalized its decision to get rid of some 7 metric tons of the 34 metric tons of plutonium using the dilute-and-dispose method: an effort in which personnel at current and planned Savannah River Site facilities will mix chemically weakened plutonium with an inert binding material, then ship it to DOE’s Waste Isolation Pilot Plant in New Mexico for deep-underground disposal.
That tranche of plutonium had no formal disposition path prior to Friday’s announcement, but had been widely expected to be turned into commercial reactor fuel at the Mixed Oxide Fuel Fabrication Facility (MFFF) at Savannah River. The Energy Department officially canceled that project in 2018, citing mounting expenses and delays. The agency now plans to convert the MFFF into a production plant for the fissile nuclear-weapon cores called pits.
Seeking removal of the plutonium, and payments for the U.S. government’s failure to remove it from the state by a federal deadline of Jan. 1, 2016, South Carolina sued DOE in the Court of Federal Claims in 2016. Federal law allows the state to collect from DOE a maximum of $100 million per year for every year the agency does not remove plutonium from the state. All of the plutonium is supposed to be out by 2022, but with dilute and dispose not scheduled to be up and running at full steam by 2028, that doesn’t appear to be in the cards.
Despite all that, the trial court refused last year to compel payment from DOE, and the state’s $200-million lawsuit is now on appeal in the Federal Circuit.
